Rolf Riehm probably won’t be a particularly familiar
name to many, and his position outside the ‘mainstream’ of contemporary
music today may be accounted for by to his uncompromising atonal
stance as a composer. Recognised as a force within the Frankfurt
School, Riehm also formed the ‘Gruppe 8 Köln’ with like-minded
colleagues from the Rhineland such as Hans Ulrich Humpert, Manfred
Niehaus and others.

The booklet notes for this release open with
a quote, “Art at its outermost reaches does not concern itself
with any obligations or solutions.” This is taken to mean a
viewpoint of suspicion when regarding or confining music to
a ‘personal style’: “I find the development of a so-called individual,
artistic language to be rather boring.” I can go a long way
with this latter statement, although it can provide an excuse
for rampant eclecticism and dismisses great swathes of composers
whose instantly recognisable personal language can be a major
hallmark on their best work. The first statement is rather self-evident:
art of any kind concerns itself with neither obligations or
solutions – at the purest level these are surely the expectations
imposed upon it by its audience. At the other extreme there
is of course much music which panders to trends and popular
culture, though this ironically has an equal sense of anonymity
when it comes to identifying ‘personal style’ in that of the
composer. I can see what he is getting at however, and disgruntled
listeners are free to read his opinions as a composer’s disclaimer
when it comes to engaging with the public, or with a certain
kind of public’s demands or expectations.

Aprikosenbäume gibt es, aprikosenbäume gibt
es translates as ‘There are apricot trees, there are apricot
trees, the opening word of Danish poet Inger Christensen’s 1981
cycle “alfabet”. The poetry is an interaction of words and mathematical
structures, using the Fibonacci series to connect with the letters
of the alphabet. Riehm’s piece opens with the first strophe
of this work, but the role of ‘narrator’ is taken on by the
contrabass clarinet, which has a long solo at the beginning
and a significant role throughout. Solo violin, cello, trumpet,
trombone and some recorded sounds creates a rather bare, unyielding,
patchwork sound landscape through which the listener is brought.

Without knowing the poem it is difficult to connect
the music to literary meaning, but Riehm’s piece is not intended
as a programmatic narrative. The listener is invited to engage
in ‘leaps of the imagination’ to which you may or may not respond.
The piece itself leaps in at least one improbable direction,
with an entire section referring to a painting, ‘Dans mes rêves
je t’adore’ by Berlin artist Bernhard Martin, which depicts
a daydream of a housewife with her vacuum cleaner – the object
of her desire being a naked man diving into water. Riehm makes
no secret of the lack of line or ‘classical’ interaction of
ideas in this and other works: “The soul doesn’t feel things
out of order, but instead in a criss-cross manner, in many speeds,
all at once.”

Ahi bocca, ahi lingua is for four vocalists,
in this case the incomparable Hilliard Ensemble. The title comes
from a madrigal, “Si, ch’io vorrei morire” (“Yes, I wish to
die”) by Claudio Monteverdi. The actual text for the piece comes
from a work by Rainald Goetz, but in the end it is the composer’s
treatment of the sounds of words and their relationship to the
punctuation and spaces between the words which carries the expressive
weight of the piece. This is accurately described as ‘a means
of articulating another notion of time, that of postponement.’
The voices undulate and jab chords in some startling contrasts
toward the beginning, and there is a fascinating extended pianissimo
section, where endless lines move among each other in a
kind of timeless, horizontal ‘endless column’. While this music
is by no means ‘easy’, the familiarity of the Hilliard’s sonorities,
or maybe just those of the human voice rather than the more
enigmatic instruments of Aprikosenbäume, make this into
a more directly communicative work. Even when there is no perceptible
meaning in much of the sounds articulated, there is a greater
sense of intervallic progression and more of feel of flow in
the temporal space occupied by the piece. Serious atonal barbershop,
the Hilliard’s virtuoso performance is certainly one which can
be highly valued.

Schlaf, schlaf, John Donne,
schlaf tief und quäl dich nicht (“Sleep, sleep John Donne, sleep well and trouble yourself not) is
written for violin, bass clarinet, accordion and keyboard. The
vocal element in the piece is sampled into the electronics,
but although the text of the title forms a kind of phonetic
backbone to the piece the meaning of the words is said to have
no effect on the development of the music, the ‘sleep’ associations
are sometimes impossible to ignore. This is a piece in which
the symbolic conceptual layers of ‘meaning’ in the media used
are almost as important as the music itself. The ear is drawn
towards a singing voice which is not a singing voice, just a
‘frozen’ and artificial set of digital instructions on a keyboard
sound-sample: the text, already shorn of all context, is further
divorced from any real association with the content of the work.
At times, there are words extended like the stream of sand in
an endless egg-timer, notes and vocal sounds are sometimes cast
like lost gravel bouncing over the unstable trampoline of a
non-foundation, and sometimes interrupted by doom-laden disco-dungeon
electronic drum-beats which shake out any thoughts of sleep
you may have been having. The more intensely structured moments
of composition and instrumental playing poke through like surrealist
mountain peaks as a result. Riehm’s own comment, one which the
booklet text author Michael Rebhahn suggests could apply to
the composer’s entire output, sums this up: “One can no longer
decipher clarity; there is no ‘line’. The case is simply that
everything is used for a very long time, and this is stronger
than any deliberate conceptual intention.”

This is the kind of music which can repel, infuriate, fascinate and
stimulate all at the same time. The music may give you a headache,
but after having heard it you may find it following you around
like polystyrene pellets in a swimming pool. You may not want
to see these at first, but in the end you become fascinated
by how they can reveal eddies and subtle flows in the seemingly
random turbulences of water. This, as well as Cybele’s excellent
recording of Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s Requiem
für einen jungen Dichter have both won the "Preis
der Deutschen Schallplattenkritik" (Award of the German
Record Critics) 2009, and the level of engineering and standard
of performance mean that both are very well deserved.

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